


Five times Fox Mulder tried to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey with his son and one time he only thought about it

by prolix (watchoutthatbowtie)



Category: The X Files Revival, The X-Files
Genre: F/M, i'm still So Sad, spoilers for Founder's Mutation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-01
Updated: 2016-02-01
Packaged: 2018-05-17 15:31:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5876251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watchoutthatbowtie/pseuds/prolix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Mulder suggests to his son that they watch <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i> is in late summer, when William looks up at him and says, “What are we going to do now, Dad? Can we watch a movie?” and Mulder thinks to himself, very seriously, <i>It’s Time.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Five times Fox Mulder tried to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey with his son and one time he only thought about it

**Five times Mulder tried to watch** **_2001: A Space Odyssey_ ** **with his son and one time he only thought about it**

 

1.

The first time Mulder suggests to his son that they watch _2001: A Space Odyssey_ is in late summer, when William looks up at him and says, “What are we going to do now, Dad? Can we watch a movie?” and Mulder thinks to himself, very seriously, _It’s Time._ The July sun is low in the sky and the deep orange light is streaming in through the big windows of the unremarkable house, streaking stripes across the hardwood floor that are warm to the touch. Scully’s out shopping, which is a shame because it’s been years since he watched this with her and he’d had vague notions of watching it all together, as a family, him making off-hand existential comments about the giant baby and Scully snorting in disbelief and William wedged in between the two of them, a wide-eyed and perfect bridge. But he knows she’ll be out for several hours, and he has a duty to science fiction and to his son.

“Yeah, let’s watch a movie,” he says to William. “How about a very cool one about humans in space?”

“Cool,” echoes William from his elbow as he shuffles past his father to clamber up onto his favourite spot on the couch. “Are there aliens?”

“Sort of.”

“… Okay,” William says skeptically, his eyes narrowing, and God, he looks just like Scully when he does that. “I like aliens though and I think they should be in everything.” Mulder snorts and slides the disk into the DVD player, pushing down the _if only you knew, kid_ that immediately bubbles up in his throat. Will bounces impatiently. “Can we have popcorn?”

“‘ _Can_ _we have popcorn_?’” he echoes, feigning disgust and he watches William’s face fall. Mulder grins. “Of _course_ we can have popcorn, Will. This is America.” Before he’s even finished the sentence, William’s shot off the couch and into the kitchen, his little legs zooming towards the snack shelf that Scully insists be always just out of his reach.

“With butter too?” he’s yelling over his shoulder.

“Oh, there’ll be butter,” Mulder says. “Just don’t tell your mother.”

Five minutes later, they are nestled on the couch, Will tucked securely into his Dad’s side and almost dwarfed by the enormous bowl of popcorn clutched between his small hands. The first strains of the music begin, and Mulder feels a tingle of excitement as prehistoric creatures lumber over the screen.

“Monkeys!” Will exclaims, his tiny left elbow poking into Mulder’s ribs as he squirms in excitement.

“Yeah – yeah, well, that’s early Man, William,” Mulder says, watching as their ancestors discover the iconic smooth black monument for the first time. He feels a thrill – the same one he feels every time he watches Kubrick’s masterpiece, but expanded this time with the delight of sharing it with his kid. “That’s the monolith.”

“What’s a momomith?”

Mulder’s heart warms at the mangled word. He looks at William and his chest is doing that funny thing it does in the presence of his son sometimes, inflating until he feels like they could float away, just the two of them, forever, sailing high above monkeys and mountains and monoliths. “Some people think it represents our first contact with aliens,” he says, watching William’s face, which is glued to the screen already. “Other people think it represents the beginning of human knowledge. I think one day you’ll probably have your own ideas about it.” He presses a kiss to Will’s hair and his boy doesn’t even notice, too busy jamming popcorn in his mouth, but Mulder feels that pressure in his chest lessen slightly, like he’s let a bit of it out into the air, where it swirls around the two of them endlessly, sticking to them like chewing gum or charged particles or stardust.

Will makes it all the way through the first part hardly moving, and Mulder is just congratulating himself on his excellent parenting – he cannot wait until Scully gets home to find William and him building their own monolith right where she will probably want to park her car – when he becomes aware of Will slowly shrinking into him. Hal’s piercing red eye is screaming out of the screen, beaming right into them and dooming the astronauts to their horrible, gruesome fate. William turns his head into his Dad’s chest in fear.

“You okay, Will?” Mulder asks. William only shakes his head, refusing to come out from where he’s practically tucked himself fully under Mulder’s arm. “Are you scared?”

A nod this time, the fabric of his shirt scratching as a tiny nose pushes it up and down his chest. Mulder feels his heart sink a notch and prays William won’t have nightmares featuring any searing red eyes in the near future because honestly if Scully finds out it’ll be _his_ turn to be afraid.

“Do you want me to turn it off?” Another nod. “Okay.” With difficulty, Mulder winds his free arm around the two of them until he can hook the remote out from beside William, pointing it at the screen and blipping out Hal’s existence with a little red button of his own. “There you go, William. It’s okay. Hal’s gone now.”

Slowly, William raises his head. Very seriously, he looks at his father, and Mulder thinks that it’s quite likely he’s about to be given an extremely stern talking-to that, despite coming from a six year old, will likely rival his mother’s scolding, when Will just says, “That robot is full of BS.”

Mulder can’t help but laugh. “Where did you learn that, William?”

“Mom.”

“No?” He’s delighted with this information, and he gleefully files it away to tell Scully as _soon_ as she gets home. “Well, William, you shouldn’t say that. It’s rude. Just say that you don’t like him instead.”

“Okay,” William says, apparently aware that he’s just gotten away with something his mother would have grounded him for. “I really don’t like that robot.”

Mulder settles deeper into the couch, pulling Will even closer. His son looks up at him with big blue eyes. “I don’t like him either, little man. But guess what?”

“What?”

“You’re already a million times smarter than him and you’re only six.” William smiles at him and Mulder grins back. “We can finish this movie another day, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“In the meantime, how about we go make a blanket fort?”

William perks up immediately, jamming the now empty popcorn bowl on his head as a makeshift helmet and jumping up from the couch, fist in the air like a superhero. “A blanket spaceship!”

“Yeah, okay,” Mulder agrees. “You’re right anyway. Spaceship trumps fort every time.”

 

2.

Mulder brings it up for a second time several months later, after William has blessedly moved on to being terrified of other things, like Lex Luthor and giant spiders and, for some bizarre reason, bowler hats. It’s a cold, wintery evening this time, and William and Mulder have spent a long, exhausting day outside in the yard, making snow aliens and having snowball fights that escalated into all-out warfare. The two of them are exhausted, and they traipse back inside with blue lips and pink noses, trailing ice chips and frozen leaves in a neat line through the house.

Later, when they are warmed up with hot chocolate and marshmallows that Scully does not know Mulder has hidden in the cupboard – some things are meant to be kept between a man and his son, after all – William asks his father a question.

“Dad, can we watch a movie?”

“Sure, William. Did you have one in mind?”

William fidgets for a minute, and Mulder is intrigued. “Well, I’m – I’m almost seven now,” he says, puffing out his chest a little. “And last night Mom told me I was even more brave than you because I didn’t scream about a spider in my room like you did last week, so,” William takes a deep breath while Mulder mentally reminds himself to have a conversation with Scully about what _actually_ constitutes a scream. “I - I think I would like to watch that space movie I was scared of last time. The one with the robot.”

“What – _2001_?”

“Yeah. Is that okay?”

Mulder grins at William, who is already brave enough to want to confront something that terrified him. There really is a lot of his mother in him, he thinks, and resolves to tell Scully how great their kid is after he’s finished informing her that he doesn’t _scream_ , he just exclaims with extra oomph. “That’s more than okay, William. I would love to watch _2001_ with you. I’m glad you remembered it.”

They settle in the middle of the couch, in much the same position as a few months ago. William is a little bigger this time, but he still fits snugly in next to his father’s shoulder, and he still grins at the monkeys.

This time, Mulder is prepared for any physical signs of fear, and keeps the remote next to him just in case he has to turn it off at the speed of light. Just before the first glimpse of Hal, Mulder turns his face to check on William properly, and is met with about as different a reaction as possible.

William is fast asleep. His soft cheek is nestled into Mulder’s side and his mouth is slightly open, his breath barely whispering over his father’s sweater.

As he looks at William, Mulder feels a great wave of protectiveness rise up in him, the same one that used to wash over him whenever Scully would fall asleep on one of their stakeouts, trusting him to stay vigilant. Only this time its for their son, a little piece of her and a little piece of him, and Mulder’s been wearing his heart outside of his body for years now, dragging it over spikes and snares and booby traps since he was 12 years old, but somehow this little boy next to him has picked it up and healed wounds he didn’t even know were still there. Carefully, he shuffles William into a more comfortable position. The boy sniffles slightly, curling up into an even smaller ball and the TV is buzzing at a low frequency and Mulder is trying to pay attention to _Discovery One’_ s plight, he truly is, but William just yawned in his sleep and yawns are the world’s worst contagion. Mulder spreads the throw blanket over both of them and rests his head on the couch just above William, cocooning him. He’ll just rest his eyes for a minute, just a minute, then he’ll get up and do something about dinner.

That’s how Scully finds them when she finally gets home from work an hour later. The credits are rolling as she takes off her boots, calling out a soft greeting in the unusually serene house. She pads into the living room, depositing her bag on a chair and looking around curiously when she spots the top of Mulder’s head lolled against the back of the couch. Silently, she glides over the floor until she’s facing both her boys, who are completely dead to the world. William is using Mulder as a pillow in much the same way she suspects she does, and Mulder’s arm is tucked protectively around his son, as if to ward off any cold chills or prehistoric apes hell-bent on world domination. The constellation-spangled throw rug is covering both of them, Mulder’s feet poking out the end while William’s legs hardly even make a dent.

As Scully stands there, looking at them, she feels an uncharacteristic lump in her throat. Foregoing her plan to wake Mulder up and order him sweetly to organise dinner _now_ because otherwise she’ll drop dead on the floor, she pulls off her coat, throws it on the chair and curls up on William’s other side, pulling some of the blanket over herself and just lying there, her head resting on Mulder’s arm and eyes tracing over the features of the two people she loves most in the world. A part of her knows instinctively that she will remember this moment for the rest of her life, and maybe even beyond that. Eventually, her own eyes slide shut, and she dreams briefly of the three of them, floating peacefully together in space, passing planets and supernovas and galaxies, hand in hand and side by side.

 

3.

“What are you two doing out there?” asks Scully, looking over her glasses as Mulder wanders into the kitchen and opens the cupboard.

“Watching a movie,” he says without looking at her, solely focused on his delegated task as Malteaser-Gatherer.

“What one?”

“ _2001_ , I think.”

“Again?”

“Well, we never really finished it last time,” he says, wondering if she’s actually hidden the damn Malteasers so he can’t eat them. “Hey – do you wanna join?”

“You know,” she says, standing up and pulling her glasses off her face, tossing them onto the stack of long, fatiguing journal articles that cover the table. “I think I actually do. What are you looking for in there, by the way?”

“The Malteasers. Please don’t tell me you ate them all.”

She makes a disbelieving snorting sound, sidling up behind him and slipping under his arm to stand between him and the shelves. “As if,” she says, crossing her arms and scanning the groceries. “Mulder, they’re right here.”

But Mulder’s no longer paying attention to the food in the cupboard, because from this angle he can see right down Scully’s cardigan and he is quite abruptly not hungry – for chocolate anyway. She mutters something about him needing to get his eyes checked but he’s suddenly winding his arms around her waist and pulling her flush against him. Satisfyingly, he hears her breath catch slightly in her throat. “Believe me,” he says into the top of her hair, “my eyes are working just fine.” His hands are running all over her body and she leans her head back against his chest, eyes shut.

“I thought you were watching _2001_ with William,” she teases, her smile like honey.

“Okay first of all, our son is a big kid now, Scully. A big kid with a million other movies I know he wants to watch.” He pulls the hair on one side of her face to the side and plants a kiss on her neck. “Second of all, I wanna watch something else now anyway.”

“That’s a really terrible line,” she says, her right eyebrow rising at the same time her neck cranes over to give him better access. The Malteasers sit on the shelf, forlornly forgotten.

“Yeah,” he says, voice scratchy, “but it’s working, isn’t it?” She spins suddenly in his arms, rising up on tip-toes to catch his mouth with hers, her hands carding through his hair, nails scratching at his scalp. He can taste her smile. Every time she does this – every single time – it makes his whole body tingle. He’s got his hands on her waist and his tongue in her mouth and she tastes way better than anything on the stupid snack shelf and really, he’s seen _2001_ a hundred times and he can watch it with Will later today, or tomorrow, or one of the other 364 days of the year because right now he has found something that is honestly a much smarter use of his time and -

“Dad, why is it taking so lo- _Ew_!” William’s revolted exclamation catches them both off guard and Mulder immediately removes his hands from under Scully’s cardigan. Scully’s hands, however, stay firmly locked around his neck. He can feel the soft tips of her fingers brushing his nape, like tiny stamps, marking him. “You two are so yucky,” Will is saying in the revolted-but-secretly-thrilled tone of a kid catching his parents doing something so obviously Grown Up. Scully looks slightly guiltily at their son, but Mulder can’t take his eyes off her.

“Will,” he says, idly examining the curve of her ear, “Did you say you wanted to watch _Harry Potter_ again?”

“I do, but you said we should finish _2001-_ ”

“Hey, if you feel like watching _Harry Potter_ , I’m not going to stop you,” Mulder says, turning to face William and actively trying to ignore Scully’s fingers, which have moved from his neck and are now dancing along the hem of his t-shirt. “I’m not really feeling up to _2001_ right now, actually, and I think I’m going to go – uh – take a nap. With your mother, who will also definitely be … napping.” Scully snorts softly. He can feel her eye roll as clearly as he can see the one William’s exasperatedly giving him.

“O-kay,” his son says as he turns out of the kitchen. “You old people are so weird. I’m going to watch _Chamber of Secrets._ ”

“We are not old,” Mulder mutters as he turns back to Scully, who’s giving him that look that always makes him feel like the bottom’s dropped out of his stomach. In a good way. A really, really good way.

“Wanna prove that to me?” she asks, holding out her hand and oh my _God,_ how did he get so lucky? All she has to do is bat her eyelashes at him and he’s a goner, even after all this time.

“Yes please,” he says, taking her hand as she leads him towards their bedroom, the faint strains of the distinctively magical John Williams score starting up in the living room behind them.

Her hands are back under his shirt and it’s torture, torture pulling away even to shut the door, which they have to do now because there is an unfortunately curious seven year old who occasionally roams about the house, determined to find an adventure. But he wastes no time, pulling her back to him as soon as he can and picking up exactly where he left off.

“You know,” she mutters, as he returns to kissing his way down her neck. “He’s just going to sneak back into the kitchen and steal those Malteasers now he knows where they are. He’ll spoil his dinner. We’re being irresponsible parents.” This sentence does not quite carry the gravitas he knows she’s hoping for, because she seems to have forgotten to breathe steadily.

“Do you know, Scully, right now I don’t actually care. I hope he eats the whole packet if it’ll mean I can have you to myself for an hour.”

“Only an hour? Mulder those _Harry Potter_ movies are two and a half hours long at least.”

“Why are we even still talking then?” he asks her, yanking her down onto the bed. Her laughter fills the room and he kisses her deeply, wildly, happily.

 

4.

Hal’s dulcet, defeated mutterings of ‘Daisy Bell’ are just murmuring to a suffocating close on screen when the power dies. The bulb above them sputters once and goes out, the screen cuts to black immediately and the room is thrown into a gloomy blue half-light melting in from the windows. Beside him, Mulder hears William mutter, “Aw, no!” and the soft slap of his little hand on his face in exasperation. Outside, the relentless storm rages, furious as ever, battering against the house and thundering over their little patch of the Earth. Upstairs, there is an explosion of extremely irritated shrieking.

“Five, four,” Mulder mutters, and William tears his eyes away from the dead TV to frown curiously at his father. “Three, two, on-”

“I don’t believe it!” Scully’s furious yell tumbles down the stairs just ahead of her thumping feet, and she reaches the living room in a wave of motion almost as unruly as the wind outside. He sees immediately that she is extremely pissed off – well, he can only really _see_ her silhouette from over there, but it is a very, very pissed silhouette. “I don’t _believe_ it! The entire article I was just writing on Landeau-Kleffner Syndrome has just up and died on me! The whole thing!”

“Did you save it?” Mulder asks, thinking idly about checking the fuse box and then, as a particularly loud crack of lightning echoes just outside, reconsiders.

“No, I didn’t save it! Not the important, rewritten bit! I mean, Mulder, _really_ \- would I be this mad if I’d saved it?!” Scully yells, throwing her hands up in frustration. She marches angrily into the kitchen where she proceeds to make a lot of livid banging noises that sound, Mulder suspects, remarkably as though an agitated howler monkey has taken up residence next to their toaster. Eventually, she returns with a big candle, which she lights and plonks on the coffee table; its flickering, inconstant light slides through the dancing shadows. Flopping herself crossly down onto the couch, she leans back and groans, her face covered by her hands. “I hate thunderstorms. I hate writing. And I hate computers the most.”

William takes one look at his mother and scoots over to her. His little hand taps the top of hers, and she splits her fingers open to peer one blue eye at him. “Don’t worry, Mom. You can fix it,” he says, with pure, undiluted confidence. “You’re smarterer than any computer, even HAL 9000.”

“Smarter, William, and thank you,” she says, softening slightly. Her hands come down off her face and she pulls her son towards her. “What brought up HAL 9000?” she asks.

“ _2001_ ,” Mulder says. “The movie we are doomed never to finish.”

Scully pouts at them, her bottom lip glistening in the flickering candle light. “Aw, I’m sorry, you guys. You’ll finish it one day. Blackouts suck.”

“Not necessarily,” Mulder says mysteriously, pushing himself off the couch and into the hall. He returns with the flashlight they keep by the door for emergencies and, plonking himself back onto the couch, sticks it under his chin and turns it on. “Not if they’re accompanied by ghost stories,” he says dramatically, his free hand waggling in the air until it lands on William’s stomach and tickles him. William shrieks with laughter and claps his hands.

“Yes please!” he says at the same time Scully says, “Mulder,” in her Warning Voice.

“Ghost stories! Please, Mom! Please!” William stands up and attempts to climb right on top of her arm in excitement and Mulder knows she’s as powerless to resist as he is when their son turns his big blue Scully eyes on either of them.

“All right,” she says. “But nothing too scary, Mulder, I’m warning you.”

“Actually, I’ve got a better idea. How about I only tell true stories?” Mulder asks. William looks at his father like he’s suddenly transformed into a squashed slug, and Mulder takes a deep, theatrical breath. “Like that time your mother and I outsmarted a real-life HAL 9000.”

His son’s eyes nearly shoot out of his sockets, and he looks up at his mother, disbelieving. “Really?” Scully smiles in spite of herself and nods at William.

“Really really. There were a couple of evil computer cases, actually, weren’t there, Mulder? There was that one in ’98 with the computer that nearly uploaded your consciousness to God-knows-where.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot about that one – with that Goth girl you had a thing for.”

“Mulder.” She looks at him, unimpressed eyebrow raised. “I did _not_ have ‘a thing’ for someone who called themselves Invisigoth.”

“You did,” he says airily. “It was the leather pants she was wearing. I saw your face, Scully, you can’t hide anything from me.”

William, who is watching the volley between his parents with the air of someone who has seen it a thousand times before but always on a quieter, more mundane topic, interrupts a slightly pink-cheeked Scully before she can retort.

“What’s an Invgsigoth?”

“Invisigoth, William, and that is absolutely not the story we will be telling you this evening,” Scully says matter-of-factly, brushing a stray hair out of her son’s face and not quite meeting Mulder’s eyes. “Pick another one, Mulder.”

“I was thinking of the first one, anyway,” he says, finally beating the smirk lurking at the corners of his mouth into submission. Confused, she looks up. “You know, the one with Brad and the elevators.”

“Oh my God, I’d forgotten that one. That was years and _years_ ago. How do you even remember this stuff?”

“You crawled out of a vent and pointed your gun at a man twice your size to save me, Scully. I don’t forget stuff like _that_. Also you looked really dishevelled. It was cute.”

She throws a pillow at him. By now, William’s eyes are as big as flying saucers, and Mulder internally flinches slightly at the comparison. “You had a gun?” he asks Scully, voice hushed and reverent.

“I did, William, you know that. Dad and I used to be FBI Agents, we told you that ages ago, remember?”

“Do all FBI Agents get a gun?”

“Usually.”

“Wow,” William exhales. He clambers right into Scully’s lap and turns to face Mulder. “I wanna hear about Brad the evil computer now.”

Mulder chuckles, the sound rumbling in his chest like the thunder in the sky miles above them. “Brad was the guy who invented the computer, Will,” he says, launching into the tale of keycards and sparks and techno-paranoia. He leaves out the more gruesome parts both to spare William the nightmares and to save himself from a Dana Scully Death Stare. Scully herself interjects if she remembers an anecdote or a fact, and there are a particularly thrilling few moments while she describes almost falling into rapidly rotating fans that would’ve chopped her and her enormous 90s shoulderpads to smithereens had she not managed to shoot out the motor at the last second. William watches her all through this, and when she explains how she escaped, he just mutters, “Wow,” under his breath. Mulder, as usual, agrees.

When they finish their tale, William sits silently for a moment, his head swivelling from parent to parent, as though he can figure out whether or not they’re both making it up just by looking accusingly at them.

“That really happened?”

“Yup,” Mulder says, popping the p as loudly as he can. “Cool, huh?”

“Yeah!” William exclaims, the click of belief shining behind his eyes. He leaps out of Scully’s lap and starts bouncing up and down on the couch. “So cool! I can’t believe Mom nearly shot someone to save you! Like, pow! Pow pow pow!” He mimes shooting an imaginary enemy with his fingers, still bounding, the springs of the couch squeaking. “Did she protect you a lot, Dad?”

Mulder grins. “She did. She’s very good at it.”

William stops bouncing suddenly and looks down at Scully, who is smiling at him. “Mom?” he says, abruptly serious. “When I go into space will you come with me and protect me from the Hals?”

Scully’s expression is so radiant, so beautiful, and Mulder rakes his eyes over it, memorising it, filing it away in the back of his mind next to flukemen and Christmas ghosts and countless other impossible things he’s seen.

“Of course I will,” Scully says to William. “I’d follow you to the stars, kid.” She pulls him in close and plants a big kiss on his cheek, and he wrinkles his nose in disgust.

“Mom, you’re not allowed to do that to me when we’re in space.”

Just then, the power flickers back on, the light above them sputtering once, twice, three times before it beams down, bathing the rest of the room in its warm orange glow. The TV beeps back into existence, but William has lost all interest in _2001_.

“Can I hear another story please? A real one with guns and the FBI.”

“How about one with vampires?” Mulder suggests, and Scully lets out an exasperated sort of squawk, like a bird being sat on.

“They were _not_ vampires, Mulder.

“They were!”

“No, they were not, there’s no evidence for any of that whatsoever -”

William settles in between them expectantly, watching them fire sentences back and forth while outside, the storm rages ever onwards, tumbling dark clouds obscuring the stars.

 

5.

It’s six in the morning when William wanders into their room, quilt clutched in his hand and trailing along the floor like a little tail. Mulder’s sprawled stomach-down on the bed, one arm thrown over Scully, who’s curled up on her side next to him.

“Mom? Dad?” William’s small voice breaks the morning silence, tenebrous timbre faint against the pink light of sunrise.

“Mmm?” Scully mumbles. “Wha…?” She gives up on the end of the word, almost exhaling herself back into slumber. Mulder’s eyes flutter open and meet his son’s, which are level with him as he shuffles closer to the edge of the bed.

“I don’t feel good.”

At that little sentence, Scully’s eyes flicker open and she props herself up on her elbows to look over the top of Mulder at William, who’s rubbing one of his own eyes miserably. “What’s wrong? she says, swinging her feet out of bed, jamming them into her slippers and shuffling around the bed to kneel in front of him. “Where do you feel sick?”

William points at his throat. “Here,” he sniffs. “Also my nose feels yucky and it was really hot in my room.”

Scully lightly presses her hand to William’s forehead for a moment, looking at him in concern. “Mulder,” she says and he grunts at her from where he’s half-watching them. “He’s definitely warm.” William groans as Scully gently rests her cold fingers on his throat. “His glands are swollen too. I think he’s got a nasty cold. Can you take the day off work?”

“Yeah,” he mumbles, trying to blink the sleep out of his eyes. Smoothing out William’s hair soothingly, Scully kisses him on the forehead.

“No school for you today,” she says, and William really must feel awful because not even those words perk him up. “Come on,” Scully says, scooping him up and carrying him out of the room. Her voice carries back to where Mulder's lying, curling around his ears like a summer breeze. “Back to bed with you, William. Do you want anything to eat at all?”

Mulder smiles to himself as he finally pushes his body off the soft mattress. Scully will worry all day about William, but she needn’t; she always takes such wonderful care of him, no matter what. There could be miles between her and her son and she’d find a way to make sure he’s okay. He wonders distantly if he’s ever told her that and thinks, if he hasn’t, he definitely should. He meanders off towards the kitchen with the vague notion of pancakes becoming more concrete by the second.

Later, William is lying curled up on the couch, rug pulled snugly over him like a snail’s shell. There’s a half-drunk glass of orange juice sitting near his dangling hand, ring slowly staining the wooden floor.

“You okay, Will?” Mulder asks as he ambles into the room. “Do you want anything to - to eat or something?”

William only squeaks quietly and shakes his head, which Mulder assumes is a negative answer. Mulder shuffles William’s feet gently out of the way and sits down, absently patting Will on the back as he does so. It sounds ridiculous even to his own brain, but sometimes Mulder forgets that his son is actually a very small human being. Snuggled up into a tiny ball on the couch, dressed in his pyjamas printed with mini Darth Vaders and TIE Fighters, he seems even littler than usual, more vulnerable, and Mulder feels a funny twinge of tenderness even as William pouts. He still looks like Scully when he does that, probably always will.

“Dad?” he asks eventually, voice scratchy. “Can we watch a movie?”

“You bet, Will,” Mulder says. “Hey - how about _2001?_ We can finally finish it!”

William just nods his assent, obviously giving up on using his words for the moment. Mulder lumbers over to the TV and fiddles with the DVD player before plonking himself back on the couch next to Will. The film’s music fills the stuffy, hot room - Scully had turned up the thermostat before she left because William had chills, and even under two throw rugs Mulder still feels slightly cold. Somehow, that suits the opening shots of the movie though, and Mulder finds himself tugged back into the space between those tiny pixelated stars.

They’re just up to the mission to Jupiter when, looking over, Mulder notices a small frown on William’s face. He huffs a little bit, his eyes drooping shut for a moment. It’s the face of someone who really _wants_ to pay attention but just cannot muster up the strength - a face that Scully used to give him after they’d been awake for 36 hours and he still wouldn’t quit pulling increasingly wild theories out of his ass. It’s the face of someone who doesn’t want to think too hard, who wants something comforting, something warm.

“Dad?” William mumble-croaks.

“Yeah?”

“I’m tired. Can …” Will swallows and winces in pain. “Can we just watch _Star Wars_ instead? Please?”

In spite of himself and in spite of this damn movie that they will probably never actually finish, Mulder smiles. “ _Empire Strikes Back_ or _A New Hope_?”

 

6.

_Do you ever think about William?_

Her voice lingers in his head long after the question has been asked, the conversation finished. It’s like the exhalation at the end of her sentence is stuck between his ears, swirling around and around and chilling him to the bone. She’d looked so small when she’d said that, so quiet, like a cracked window, functional but brittle.

 _Do you ever think about William?_ He suspects it takes a special sort of skill to believe in the paranormal and yet be haunted and hunted by reality. _Do you ever think about William?_

He’d told her _of course_ , and it had echoed in his body even as he followed up with the admission that he’s had to put William behind him. That’s the truth - he _has_ put William behind him. His son follows him every day of his life, tied to him like a ball and chain, like the rush of warmth from a fireplace, like a toddler gripping an ankle. She’s the one who does the autopsies, who drags and jerks and squeezes the murder weapon from the body, who literally exorcises the demons. Not him – he lets things fester until he can’t tell what’s growth and what’s mould. In a warped way, maybe he’s afraid of losing these memories, these possibilities, these realities. They can’t truly disappear if he can still feel them cleaving holes in him.

_Do you ever think about William?_

Does he ever think about his son? He thinks about him a lot, actually, about the maybes and the might-have-beens of their domestic life. He would’ve called him Will, would’ve played catch with him in the yard, would’ve cut the crusts off his sandwiches, would’ve told him all about zombies and men with rubber limbs and that time his mother had shot him in the shoulder, _just here Will, look, see the scar_? There are a thousand different things they’ve done in his head, a thousand different moments shared.

He imagines that one day, he would’ve shown William _2001:_ _A Space Odyssey_. He probably would’ve liked it. Their kid, with his feet on the ground and his head in the stars before he was even born – yeah, he would’ve liked it. He imagines William curled up on the couch next to him, afraid of Hal, or the power blowing out before they could finish it, or them falling asleep in the quiet bits, or him getting distracted by the stars in Scully’s eyes instead of on the damn screen, or William, tired and probably fed up with his dad’s philosophical space musings, asking him to just please put Star Wars on instead.

These thoughts are always vague and smoky, like looking through a dirty mirror at a version of him that doesn’t quite exist anyway. Maybe that’s why he’s never imagined or dreamed of them actually finishing the movie – these thoughts are doomed to exist in halves, in un-realities, just as his son is to him.

But that’s the point, after all. These thoughts are just imaginings, just fantasies. He’s crafted this space for himself in his mind where he can share these things with his son because he knows that none of this will ever happen. Nonetheless, he sinks into these possibilities like they’re quicksand, lets them swallow him whole until he can neither see nor breathe. The kaleidoscope of colour and sound rushes past him, and he tries not to feel the edges of lightsaber battles and rocket launches and bedtime stories snagging on his skin like thorns.

_Do you ever think about William?_

 

**Author's Note:**

> this was inspired by that damn ending scene in founder's mutation which - not to be dramatic - actually ruined my entire life. also inspired by [jadie's](http://foxmulders.tumblr.com/post/138058118386/you-know-half-way-through-2001-a-space-oddessey) post on tumblr abt mulder and william accidentally snoozin' in the middle of 2001 & scully coming home & them all sleeping on the couch. super special thanks to sara who saved my ass about ten times as i was writing this. also some of it is also unedited bc it is one in the morning.


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